Rude, impulsive, sulky… still, let our 16-year-olds vote

Vote early: young people should be encouraged to engage with politics. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

As Lord Forsyth of Drumlean pointed out last week, there are many weighty issues to be considered before Alex Salmond is allowed to bounce the whole of the UK into extending the vote to 16-year-olds, purely because he hopes the Scottish ones will be keen on him.

"Matters of electoral importance and the extension of the franchise are not matters to be carried out in hole-in-the-corner negotiations," said Lord Forsyth, a person who, 16-year-olds may be interested to hear, owes his seat in the Upper House to a hole-in-the-corner system that we older people call "patronage": synonyms "sponsorship", "cronyism", "rewarding loyalty". This means that no one, literally, as in not even people over 18, voted to empower Lord Forsyth, who is a banker in his spare time. Funnily enough, even the Labour party likes this system so much they just voted to save it.

But of course Lord Forsyth is right. There are hugely important questions to answer before 16-year-olds can be invited, just like that, into the complicated electoral process. Are they sufficiently mature? Can they tell one party from another? Are they, as some fear, too busy with their exams and hectic social lives to be arsed? Even the care and suppression of spots, a priority with some teenagers, has been cited as a reason under-18s might struggle, unlike older voters whose complexions have settled down, to give adequate thought to the case for further quantitative easing.

There was a long period, between being 16 and then, decades later, getting to know some living teenagers, including the one in my own house, when I would have agreed with champions of the status quo. Presumably – without knowing any – these 16-year-olds were as clueless as my younger self, but with an increased obsession with their peer group that comes of being more affluent and better entertained, with unpatrolled access to social media.

If these conditions were not enough to guarantee extreme teen disengagement, scientists have supplied biological reasons to disregard their BlackBerry-fixated frontal cortexes. Last time there was a significant move to reduce the voting age, Richard Dawkins set out the potential risks posed to our current epistocracy by the undeveloped teenaged bonce. An epistocracy, as older voters will know, is government by wise people, with fully developed brains. In practice, it means that a grown-up who believes in magic can be health secretary, or a grown-up bully can be chief whip, but a schoolgirl the age of, say, Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani blogger, has yet to acquire the intellectual credentials to vote.

In a 2003 article, Dawkins and his co-writer, Elisabeth Cornwell, cited evidence from neuroscientists that "the brain undergoes major reconstruction from the onset of puberty which continues until 20 or beyond". Crucial, if I understand them correctly, is the importance of this continuing development to the frontal lobes, "the very bit that enables us to think in the abstract, weigh moral dilemmas and control our impulses". Without a fully developed lobe, for example, our own, superbly frontally endowed mayor of London would not be the dedicated family man many Conservatives still hope to see as prime minister (that's the person who runs the country, kids).

It was not even clear, the authors said, that teens are developed enough to "be making life-changing decisions for themselves". This comes as no news, of course, to all those already working to extend childhood ever further, by keeping all teenagers at school until they are 18, or by denying them proper wages, or by confining them within the parental home until their frontal lobes are ready to explode.

Dawkins and Cornwell quoted a neuroscientist, Jay Giedd, stressing that teens are not stupid or incapable, but "it's sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organisational skills or decision-making before their brain is finished being built".

On the other hand, the unfinished brain can be pretty good at sport, music, creating computer software. So what are its key disadvantages? True, 16-year-olds can be rude, sulky, reckless, ignorant, violent and unreliable. It worked for do John Prescott. Even if – as politicians must hope – most children are know too little about Westminster to make unflattering comparisons with the brainpower on show at PMQs, the evidence of their own eyes confirms that they barely compete, in terms of incivility, temper, swearing, impulsivity, prejudice, time-wasting and an unedifying dependency on the Daily Mail website, with millions of fully enfranchised grown-ups. If they ever think of restricting voting by the inadequately brained, illiterate, non-taxpaying or irredeemably ignorant, the consequences for adults are chilling.

It's natural, if unlikely to cultivate teenage responsibility, that opponents of age reduction should dwell so unforgivingly on misbehaviour that corrects itself, presumably, the minute they turn 18. No, teenagers don't always evince much money sense, although they do, as consumers, pay sales tax. Yes, if voting booths were bedrooms they would probably leave wet towels all over them or worse. And supposing you could get in a voting booth and drive it away at 80mph, enhanced teen access would indeed be extremely worrying. But having now witnessed some of the more lovable teenage qualities – idealism, energy, a sense of injustice, open-mindedness – these seem to be exactly the ones of which modern politics is starved. If it's obviously placing too much faith in citizenship classes to think that enfranchised year 11s would emerge like so many wee Milibands, agog for manifestos and fratricide, how could this new chance to connect their hopes with political action not be an improvement on reality?

Even a limited turnout by young voters, minus all the ones who are too apathetic or too busy insulting policemen or holding Nazi-themed drinking parties, might inject some life into the next election.

Naturally, engaged teenagers would want answers on stuff such as unpaid interns, their chaotic exam system, tuition fees, the minimum wage, workfare, eroding benefits and also perhaps any military engagements in which they might be invited to serve.

More important, given existing parental interest in the above, would be a fresh look at policies that affect future generations, by voters who do not expect to be dead soon. If voting has to be rationed, maybe it should be non-taxpaying elderly citizens, who will not live to see the impact, say, of political betrayal on pollution and climate change or of carelessness about fuel sustainability, who should give way to the 16-year-olds?

We could compromise: make it 17. So that teenagers only had a year to wait, after they had already married, donated an organ, bought fireworks, left home and signed up to fight for their country, before they were allowed to choose, alone in an exposed voting booth, between one nation and aspiration nation. To judge by the resistance, you'd think we were doing them a great big favour.